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Nothing in physics seems so hopeful to as the idea that it is possible for a theory to have a high degree of symmetry was hidden from us in everyday life. The physicist's task is to find this deeper symmetry.

Steven Weinberg

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Steven Weinberg
Age: 88 †
Born: 1933
Born: May 3
Died: 2021
Died: July 23
Cosmologist
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
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Hopeful
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Theory
Hidden
Life
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Physics
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Physicist

More quotes by Steven Weinberg

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Most scientists I know don't care enough about religion even to call themselves atheists.
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[Science] is corrosive of religious belief, and it's a good thing too.
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The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
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If you have bought one of those T-shirts with Maxwell's equations on the front, you may have to worry about its going out of style, but not about its becoming false. We will go on teaching Maxwellian electrodynamics as long as there are scientists.
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My advice is to go for the messes - that's where the action is.
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This doesn't mean that they commit themselves to the view that this is all there is. Many scientists (including me) think that this is the case, but other scientists are religious, and believe that what is observed in nature is at least in part a result of God's will.
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For good people to do evil things, it takes religion.
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Premature as the question may be, it is hardly possible not to wonder whether we will find any answer to our deepest questions, any signs of the workings of an interested God, in a final theory. I think that we will not.
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A physicist friend of mine once said that in facing death, he drew some consolation from the reflection that he would never again have to look up the word hermeneutics in the dictionary.
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As for me, I have just enough confidence about the multiverse to bet the lives of both Andrei Linde and Martin Rees’s dog.
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In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.
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A theorist today is hardly considered respectable if he or she has not introduced at least one new particle for which there is no experimental evidence.
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Though aware that there is nothing in the universe that suggests any purpose for humanity, one way that we can find a purpose is to study the universe by the methods of science, without consoling ourselves with fairy tales about its future, or about our own.
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How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?
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In our universe we are tuned into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them.
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There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.
Steven Weinberg
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If there is a God that has special plans for humans, then He has taken very great pains to hide His concern for us. To me it would seem impolite if not impious to bother such a God with our prayers.
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I enjoy being at a meeting that doesn't start with an invocation!
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If history is any guide at all, it seems to me to suggest that there is a final theory. In this century we have seen a convergence of the arrows of explanation, like the convergence of meridians toward the North Pole.
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It appears that anything you say about the way that theory and experiment may interact is likely to be correct, and anything you say about the way that theory and experiment must interact is likely to be wrong.
Steven Weinberg